Page 62 of Midnight Secrets

She shivered, looking for the words to describe the horrible feeling of menace.

“Take your time,” Joe murmured.

He was good. She’d been to two shrinks who had tried to lead her through her memories but she had felt pushed, prodded. Joe simply waited to hear what she would say. You’d think soldiers would be restless adrenaline junkies, but Joe was the opposite. He always gave off an air of infinite calm and right now of infinite patience.

“This air of menace. Of great evil. I know that sounds crazy?—”

“Evil exists in the world,” Joe said quietly. “I’ve seen it, touched it.”

Yes, he would understand. He had been a soldier in terrible wars. He would understand evil.

“Dark, menacing. Horrible.Triumphant. As if it knew something we didn’t. But all these people dancing and laughing and celebrating—they’re clueless. Something truly horrible is about to happen and I am trying to warn everyone, but they’re not listening. They can’t hear me. I want to scream but I can’t. I want to run around but I can’t. I can’t move. It’s horrible.”

“Sleep paralysis,” Joe said. “Glycine and gamma-aminobutyric acid paralyzing the muscles during REM sleep. It’s a self-defense mechanism of the body. Otherwise we’d kill people in our sleep.”

“Awful. Just awful.” Like being trapped. “So no one would listen to me, no one paid me any attention at all, though I knew something horrible was going to happen. They didn’t even pay attention when something horribledidhappen.” She drew in a deep shuddering breath. “People started dying.”

They were silent. Isabel couldn’t go on and Joe simply wrapped himself more tightly around her, a wall of warm flesh acting as protection.

Finally, Isabel spoke again. The nightmare was starting to lose its contours, fade. She wanted to nail it while she could see some flashes of it. “I was told by police authorities that they used machine guns during the Massacre. They even told me the make and the caliber, though I don’t remember any of that.”

“AK-47s,” Joe said softly. “The weapon of choice of your discerning terrorist.”

Isabel shook. AK-47s had killed her parents, her brothers. Her aunts, uncles, cousins. And hundreds more family friends and supporters of her dad’s policies. She squeezed her eyes tight but one tear seeped out, ran down her cheek.

Joe wiped it away with his thumb. He didn’t apologize for telling her the make of the weapons. Any website would tell her. She’d wiped it from her mind, but the reality didn’t change.

“In my dream they had guns, of all types. And swords. They hacked at people. I saw limbs being sliced off. What I think was a shotgun nearly took off the head of a man standing next to me. I’d been holding his arm, trying to get his attention, when all of a sudden I was covered in blood and brains.”

She twisted again to look at Joe. His face was expressionless but his dark eyes were warm. “None of this is real, though. From what I understand there were no swords. The lights went out immediately anyway and nobody could have seen anything. So it’s a nightmare that comes from my subconscious and not my memory. Do you see the difference?”

He nodded his head slowly.

“And then there was…him.”

“Who, Isabel?”

There was only one possible answer to that. An answer that came straight from the bottom of her soul. “Evil. Pure evil. A—a man. On the podium, staring at me. Only I couldn’t see his eyes, they were deep in shadow. And he had a huge mouth, full of teeth. It seemed like he had more teeth than a human should have…”

Isabel shut up. It sounded like she was describing a vampire, not a human. Some supernatural being. It was her subconscious ascribing monstrous qualities to him when the monstrosity was internal, not external.

“Sorry. He was…unsettling. And he smiled as his minions mowed people down. As if he were enjoying it. As if he were on the stage watching something that pleased him. None of the killers had a face, they were like devils, killing and killing. And yet some of the people in that big room still hadn’t understood what was going on, were still laughing and chatting, while others were being killed in the most horrific ways. And I couldn’t get them to listen, to pay attention. To run away. It was as if I were invisible. So I tried to get them to head for the exits but I couldn’t, and I slipped in the blood that was flowing and I tried to run harder…” She buried her face in her heads.

“And then I woke you up,” Joe said gently.

She nodded, her limbs shaking, a huge lump of something sharp in her throat.

Joe pulled the blankets up to cover her shoulders, rocking her gently, as you would a child.

At that moment, Isabel felt like a child. A child who’d seen the boogeyman and was terrified he’d come back.

Joe let her take her time putting herself back together again. He didn’t say anything, he just held her, rocked her. Finally, when she was calm again, he leaned down and spoke in her ear.

“You know, Lauren is a great artist. Do you think you could give her a description of this man, like you would to a police artist?”

Could she? “Maybe. But in my nightmare he was a monster. It wouldn’t be of any use to anybody.”

“You never know,” he said, his voice neutral. “If nothing else, it might rob him of his power in your subconscious.”

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